


Salvage

by SilverDagger



Series: Paths Outside the Garden [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Ficlet, Future Fic, Gen, Sandman Crossover, ambiguously hopeful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 14:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12655365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: Capable runs into an old stranger one more time.A quick coda to my Sandman crossoverPaths Outside the Garden, which probably won’t make sense unless you’ve read at least Capable’s chapter of that one.





	Salvage

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts with only a few sentences left to go for a couple of years now, and I’ve finally decided to finish it up and post it. I will confess that it mostly exists because I didn’t want to leave Del’s dog unaccounted for

Capable sees the man one more time, years after, just wandering through the way he does. 

She's in the chop shop that day, like she usually is before the day's heat turns work into a trial by endurance, salvaging the latest finds her Boys dragged back. This time, she's disassembling the engine block of a badly corroded truck, picking through it for anything usable. It's a familiar looking machine, though she can't put a finger on where she might have seen it before, and most of it is ruined beyond repair, but a part or two are in surprisingly good shape for something found on the edge of the salt.

One moment, she's sure she's alone. The next, she looks up from her work to see a man with hair like hers leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, like he's been there the whole time and she's only just now noticing. He doesn't look any older. For some reason, that doesn't surprise her at all.

He's got a dog sitting at his heels, and that does surprise her. She had thought they were extinct, something you could only find in books, like the Green Place or the world before it was cracked wide and hollowed out and left for dead. But then, it seems these days that lot of things are turning out to be different than she always thought.

She wipes the grease from her hands, pushes her goggles back, and says, "What brings you here?"

"Looking for my sister," he says. "Used to be, you could always find her around here if you waited long enough, but it seems she hasn't been by lately."

He reaches down to skritch behind the dog's ears, smiling fondly, and adds, "If you see her - and I'm not saying you will, or that you want to - do me a favor and let her know that I found her dog."

"Sure," Capable says. She reaches for her bottle of water, takes a long drink and then holds it out to him the way you do for a welcome guest, or at least the way her clan always did before the raiders caught them. Her Boys are too young to have been a part of that. She's glad she doesn't have to wonder, but a few years' difference and they might not have been, and it's probably best not to forget it. Between one moment and the next, the universe remakes itself - only a little different than it had been before.

"Last we talked," the man says, "you were telling me you had a way of fixing broken things." At first, she doesn't remember what he's talking about. Then something connects and sparks in her head, like two halves of a cut wire pulled together, and she does.

"That was a long while back," she says, and what she's learned since then is that not everything can be salvaged, no matter how much blood and pain you pour into it. Sometimes things just break. Sometimes all you can do is take them to pieces and make something else from what's left. And sometimes someone you thought lost forever shows up one day out of the desert like nothing's changed at all, but it does no good to pin your hopes on it.

"Think you can fix that?" the man asks, nodding to the truck.

"Probably not," she says. "But I might be able to save a few of the parts. Why? Looking to trade?"

"Not for that," he says. "It's yours, and I've got little enough use for it where I'm headed. But I'd like to see what you make of it."

She doesn't ask what she's been wondering. She isn't sure that she really needs an answer, or that she’d know what to do with one if it was given, and besides, he doesn’t seem like the answering type. She just meets his ancient eyes and holds out a hand for him to clasp, a farewell or a deal sealed, and she smiles.

"Find your way back here someday, and maybe you will."


End file.
